White Spirit: The Dutch boy mopping up a sea of plastic - Whites are the only race who care about making the world better/cleaner

Boyan Slat is a 20-year-old on a mission - to rid the world's oceans of floating plastic. He has dedicated his teenage years to finding a way of collecting it. But can the system really work - and is there any point when so much new plastic waste is still flowing into the sea every day?

"I don't understand why 'obsessive' has a negative connotation, I'm an obsessive and I like it," says Boyan Slat. "I get an idea and I stick to it."

This idea came to him at the age of 16, in the summer of 2011, when diving in Greece. "I saw more plastic bags than fish," says Slat. He was shocked, and even more shocked that there was no apparent solution. "Everyone said to me: 'Oh there's nothing you can do about plastic once it gets into the oceans,' and I wondered whether that was true."

Over the last 30 to 40 years, millions of tonnes of plastic have entered the oceans. Global production of plastic now stands at 288 million tonnes per year, of which 10% ends up in the ocean in time. Most of that - 80% - comes from land-based sources. Litter gets swept into drains, and ends up in rivers - so that plastic straw or cup lid you dropped, the cigarette butt you threw on the road… they could all end up in the sea.

The plastic is carried by currents and congregates in five revolving water systems, called gyres, in the major oceans, the most infamous being the huge Pacific Garbage Patch, half way between Hawaii and California.

Although the concentration of plastic in these areas is high - it's sometimes described as a plastic soup - it's still spread out over an area twice the size of Texas. What's more, the plastic does not stay in one spot, it rotates. These factors make a clean-up incredibly challenging.

"Most people have this image of an island of trash that you can almost walk on, but that's not what it's like," says Slat. "It stretches for millions of square kilometres - if you went there to try and clean up by ship it would take thousands of years." Not only that, it would be very costly in terms of both money and energy, and fish would be accidentally caught in the nets.

Slat had always enjoyed working out solutions to puzzles, and while pondering this one, it came to him - rather than chase plastic, why not harness the currents and wait for it to come to you?

At school, Slat developed his idea further as part of a science project. An array of floating barriers, anchored to the sea bed, would first catch and concentrate the floating debris. The plastic would move along the barriers towards a platform, where it could then be efficiently extracted. The ocean current would pass underneath the barriers, taking all buoyant sea life with it. There would be no emissions, and no nets for marine life to get entangled in. The collected ocean plastic would be recycled and made into products - or oil.

Computer animation of Boyan Slat's plastic catching system

The high school science project was awarded Best Technical Design at Delft University of Technology. For most teenagers, it would probably have ended there, but Slat was different. He had been interested in engineering from a very young age. "First I built tree houses, then zip-wires, then it evolved towards bigger things," he says. "By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry." This led him to set a Guinness World Record for the most water rockets launched at the same time: 213, from a sports field in his native Delft. "The experience taught me how to get people crazy enough to do things you want, and how to approach sponsors." Useful skills, as it turned out.

When Slat began studying aerospace engineering at Delft University, the idea of cleaning up the oceans just wouldn't let him go - he says it niggled at him like "an asymmetrically positioned label" on a pair of boxer shorts. He set up a foundation, The Ocean Cleanup, and explained his concept in a TedX Talk: How the Oceans can Clean Themselves. Then, six months into his course, he made the decision to pause both university and social life to try make it a reality.

His entire budget consisted of 200 euros (£160) of saved-up pocket money, so he spent a few desolate months trying to get sponsorship. "It was so disheartening, because no-one was interested," he says. "I remember one day contacting 300 companies for sponsorship - only one replied, and that, too, resulted in a dead end."

But then something happened. On 26 March 2013, months after it had gone online, Slat's TedX talk went viral. "It was unbelievable," he says. "Suddenly we got hundreds of thousands of people clicking on our site every day. I received about 1,500 emails per day in my personal mailbox from people volunteering to help." He set up a crowd-funding platform that made $80,000 in 15 days.

Slat still doesn't know what made his idea take off like that, but he describes it as a great relief. "A year ago I wasn't sure it would succeed," he says. "But considering the size of the problem it was important to at least try."

The amount of plastic being discarded into the marine environment is such that we could eventually see an ocean where the amount of plastics is roughly one third the total biomass of fish - 1lb of plastic for every 2lbs of fish, according to Nicholas Mallos from Ocean Conservancy, which organises coastal clean-ups.

According to the UN Environment Programme there are on average 13,000 pieces of floating plastic per square kilometre of ocean - but that goes up to millions of pieces in the gyres. Many of these particles end up being accidentally ingested by marine animals, which can die of starvation because of the plastic filling their stomachs.

A decayed albatross carcass shows the amount of plastic it had ingested

Albatrosses are particularly vulnerable because they feed on the eggs of flying fish, which are attached to floating objects - now most likely a piece of plastic. Dr Jan Andries van Franeker from the Institute for Marine Resources an

Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson at their hanging camp on El Capitan at Yosemite

Extreme sports is a context for implicit Whiteness:

Quote:

Extreme athletes exist in an implicitly White world where they associate only with other White men—“a racially and gender exclusive place” where White men “can un-apologetically perform an ideal masculinity which they cover by taking death-defying risks, enduring the pain of participation and displaying an unwavering confidence and coolness in the face of apparent danger.” …

White men jumping off buildings and sky surfing are reenacting a fundamental script of Western culture—the same script that underlies Western energy, inventiveness, exploration and creativity. “Extreme Sports as a Context of Implicit Whiteness“

As Domitius Corbulo notes in his comment on the vast overrepresentation of Europeans as explorers:

Quote:

Exploration is not only a popular subject, but one filled with fascinating stories of human greatness, heroic will, and stamina against immense odds and hardship—exactly the sorts of traits that, according to cultural Marxists, should not be found to be unusually common among Europeans. …

Roughly speaking I counted about 75 great European explorers in the period from about 1800 to the present, men (and a few women) who dedicated themselves to the discovery of the unknown, reconnoitering every place of the planet, climbing the highest mountains, penetrating into the deepest crevices of the oceans and high above in space. This history is rarely taught in our schools and universities; it has been virtually banned, or slandered by charges of imperialism.

Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson exemplify these traits, with a strong dose of perseverance and incredible bravery. They have succeeded in a free climb of El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park. “Free climbing” is climbing from ledge to ledge using only the natural features in the rock, using ropes only for protection in case of a fall, and not relying on gear for upward progress. The photos below give some idea of the challenges involved.

Tommy Caldwell free climbing El Capitan

Quote:

It was the first ascent of the 3,000-foot Dawn Wall in a single expedition with the use of only hands and feet to pull climbers up — a challenge long considered impossible. Ropes were merely safety devices to break the occasional fall. For Caldwell, a 36-year-old from Estes Park, Colo., it was a goal that he could not shake since he first seriously conjured the idea a decade ago. It became his life-bending quest, a personal Moby Dick. Could every inch of the blank, vertical face of the Dawn Wall be climbed with nothing more than bare hands and rubber-soled shoes? He was not sure. He never was, really, until Wednesday…. (New York Times)

Caldwell and Jorgeson see their feat in a wider context:

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JORGESON I hope it inspires people to find their own Dawn Wall, if you will. We’ve been working on this thing a long time, slowly and surely. I think everyone has their own secret Dawn Wall to complete one day, and maybe they can put this project in their own context. …

CALDWELL For me, I love to dream big, and I love to find ways to be a bit of an explorer. These days it seems like everything is padded and comes with warning labels. This just lit a fire under me, and that’s a really exciting way to live. And this has driven me for a really long time.

JORGESON I wanted to see what I was capable of, and this was the biggest canvas and the most audacious project I could join and see to the finish. Like Tommy, I don’t know what is next. New York Times

Kevin Jorgeson

Jorgeson’s girlfriend, Jacqui Becker, told the San Jose Mercury News:

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“To call them thrill seekers is to minimize the profundity of their passion and commitment,” Becker says. She adds, “There is absolutely nothing thrilling about spending six years hauling thousands of pounds of gear up and down a mountain in freezing temperatures. There is nothing thrilling about leaving loved ones to tackle a distant dream. There is nothing thrilling about rehearsing and practicing and studying the same holds over and over until you dream them.” (NPR)

Jorgeson’s hands, January 9

The Washington Post article gives a good feeling for the difficulties involved:

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A storm defeated them in 2010. And in 2011, Jorgeson broke his ankle during their second try, according to the Los Angeles Times. But this year, they were ready for the challenge.

About a third of the way up, they set up camp — a hanging platform tenttethered to the wall. They rappelled down with ropes to sleep after each night’s grueling climb. They made coffee and sandwiches — whole-wheat bagels with cream cheese, cucumber, red-bell pepper and salami, Jorgeson told National Geographic. Then they set out again.

They climbed in the dark, using headlamps to light the way. Climbing during the daytime would be too risky, since the sun would heat the rock, causing their tired hands to sweat and slip from the coin-thick nooks and crannies.

Indeed, the climbers had some setbacks along the way.

The 15th pitch proved most hopeless for Jorgeson. For seven nights, he fell — eight times, nine times, then 10 times. He texted his girlfriend one word: “Devastated.” …

“I’d pull back from the ledge, having split my finger yet again, and then realize I have to take another two rest days. You’re thinking about the timing, the weather, whether or not you’re going to have another chance to do it,” he told National Geographic. “But then, you know, 30 minutes goes by and you’re back to that state of resolve.”

On his 11th try Jan. 9, Jorgeson cleared the pitch and, the following night, he was on to the 16th — where he had to make an 8-foot leap from one small, slippery crevasse to another. …

“This goes beyond what has been done, and it goes into completely new territory,” Timmy O’Neill, a professional climber who has climbed with Caldwell on El Capitan, told the Denver Post. “He’s standing on his own shoulders when he stands on the shoulders of giants to get this done.”

Unfortunately, the spirit seen in these men is all too rare among us now — destroyed by affluence and overindulgence in food and drink, and seduced by the mind-numbing pleasures of a life squandered in front of television. The corruption of the culture of the West has many effects, but one of the most important is that it’s so easy to give into the life of passive consumption. Passive consumers will not make a revolution.

So it’s good to be reminded that there are still those among us who possess the psychological traits needed for great deeds. These lines from Beowulf capture well the Faustian spirit apparent in these men that is so central to understanding the West — and, I suggest, Caldwell and Jorgeson:

As we must all expect to leave
our life on this earth, we must earn some renown,
If we can before death; daring is the thing
for a fighting man to be remembered by. …
A man must act so
when he means in a fight to frame himself
a long lasting glory; it is not life he thinks of. (See “Extreme Sports as a Context of Implicit Whiteness“)

“If people do not control themselves by inner direction, then they must be controlled by making them an offer they cannot refuse. This offer consists of an inescapable alternative. Firing squads work very well in this regard.”

“I've been shit on and shot at; lied to and lied about; thrown from a bridge; damned near paralyzed from spinal meningitis; watched my mother die when I was a kid and a few years later, my brother. I've enjoyed the delusion of being in love and learned from the snippet who ultimately betrayed me and stole everything I owned. My only son died before he could walk, and you know what? I AM STILL HERE! I have been on top of the world and in its darkened depths but I never copped out to alcohol or drugs; have never went back on my word; never "ratted" on anyone and never stole anything from anyone. As long as my ass can muster up the strength, I'll keep on marching. It's great to be a White man.”

• Amsterdam, Netherlands A terminally ill woman looks at a self-portrait of Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. Dutch charity Ambulance Wens granted the dying woman’s last wish for a private viewing of the Rembrandt exhibition
Photograph: Roel Foppen/AP

Mr Hinke said Steck – known as the Swiss Machine – was famous for doing technically difficult climbs very fast and solo – including classic Alpine routes like the north face of the Eiger, which he completed in two hours and 47 minutes without using a rope.

He said: “He was pushing the envelope, but he was at the top of his game.

"My love of playing is still the same as when I was 24. In fact, I appreciate it all more and understand it much better," Allman told the Wall Street Journal in 2015. "I'm grateful for every gold record, good review and award I've ever received, but I'm just so into what I'm doing and that's where my focus is."

It’s easy enough to read it: On June 3, 2017, Alex Honnold rewrote what is humanly possible by climbing the nearly 3,000-foot-tall face of Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope.

It’s harder to understand how or why, but let’s try.

Start with the feat, and the feat alone: Alex Honnold, a 31-year-old universally acclaimed climbing genius, scaled El Capitan without a rope, aid, or any help whatsoever. That is yes, almost 3,000 feet of climbing and focus applied to the almost sheer, vertical surface most consider to be the heart of the rock climbing universe, done without so much as a BASE jumping chute for a sliver of the illusion of safety.

In 1958, the first three climbers to make it all the way up El Capitan did it only after 18 months of planning and 47 days of actual climbing. They used ropes and drove pitons into the rock itself to secure their progress, and established a series of base camps along the way on a long siege of the climb. Even skilled climbers working today typically take four days to summit the most commonly climbed route, the standard called The Nose.

The route Honnold chose, Freerider, requires a similar commitment of time and resources. There are climbers sleeping on the rock as we write this, very fit, very experienced climbers who will need the better part of a week to knock off. They will sleep there, haul gear from station to station, and even defecate into PVC pipes and carry it with them for disposal later in order to finish the climb. I know this because Alex Honnold said in an interview just after the climb that he woke a few of them up on his way up the rock, passing them without a rope as they slept in Bivy platforms attached to the wall.

That route — my god, I almost don’t want to tell you what’s involved because it makes my hands start sweating just thinking about it. The rock is nearly vertical or past vertical. It heats up in the sun and messes with grip, and starts out cold enough to tear off callouses, leaving a climber’s hands bloody and useless. There are cracks small enough to get hands and feet stuck in, requiring expensive and embarrassing rescue; there are “off-width” cracks, big enough to require delicate use of the entire body as a kind of safety plug, a sometimes nightmarish move for a climber even with protection.

The entirety of Freerider grades out at a 5.12d on a scale that only goes up to 5.15. The crux of the route — i.e. the hardest part — is something called “The Teflon Corner,” a move working across holds no bigger than 1/8th of an inch requiring “a karate kick.” When Honnold was sizing up possible free solo routes on El Cap in 2009, even he doubted tackling Freerider because of the crux: "I've never even looked at the Teflon Corner, but it doesn't sound like something you'd want to solo.”

Eight years later, Honnold blew through the Teflon Corner with ease.* He finished a route most people do in four days in three hours and 56 minutes. He was wearing only a red shirt, cutoff nylon climbing pants, and a pair of climbing shoes when he did it, and carried only a bag of chalk. He was done by 9:28 a.m. PT.

*Correction: Honnold blew through the crux at “The Boulder Problem,” which is a 5.13a rock climbing move, not the Teflon Corner. This is a photo of Pete Whittaker working his way through that section. No, we can’t see what he’s holding onto, either, or how anyone would attempt this with a rope, much less without one.

There is also the matter of how he did this: Free soloing, i.e. climbing without a rope or any aid of any sort. There is no bigger level of commitment to your own skill as an athlete than free soloing a climb. There is no backup past your ability, no preservation from chance or the random disaster, no option B to select on the menu. If a free soloist makes a mistake on an ascent past a certain height, then that free soloist dies, often in violent and spectacular fashion.

Pedantry about free soloing being a glorified suicide helps me make this point: For Alex Honnold, the most unreal aspect of his ascent of Freerider is that it might not even be within the range of unreal for him.

Honnold didn’t use siege tactics and pitons to climb El Cap, but his preparation was no less rigorous. Honnold studied and worked the route — often alongside pioneering free soloist Peter Croft — for years. He free soloed other faces to get a feel for long climbs without protection done at scales that would melt other climbers’ brains. For comparison, take a look at Moonlight Buttress, and feel the fear tingling in your knees and neck just looking at it, and then consider how Honnold did this free solo almost nine years ago, when he was just getting started two years after dropping out of UC-Berkeley to live in his van and climb.

Consider how Honnold’s brain processes fear differently than the average human brain, and how his ability to stay calm and focused despite dangling by his fingertips a thousand feet off the ground comes from his amygdala barely firing under circumstances that would set most other people’s emotional centers on fire. Read about his fingerboard workouts, which he does in an L-sit position to keep his feet off the ground because he has to do them hanging from the frame of his home. Consider that his home is a van he lives in so he can devote his entire life to climbing, and that he rolled out of that same van to climb up the full height and length of Freerider, and that he spent the night before what will likely be the greatest achievement of his or any other rock climber’s career in that van, watching “the last Hobbit movie” and “vegging.”

Also think about there being nothing past this, at least not on Earth. There are larger sheer rock faces on the planet, but almost all of them involve some degree of alpine-style climbing just to get there, and are located in places where the climate and geography are almost as much of an obstacle as the wall itself. Free soloing Trango Towers or Mount Thor would be legitimate suicide attempts made into the teeth of freezing weather and unstable rock conditions. Honnold’s risk in the end was no less absolute, but was also wagered at the very edge of the limit of the possible. What might lie beyond Yosemite is a degree of madness — even for the visibly mad free soloing community, where competitors race only themselves, each other’s records, and ultimately Death.

Finally: Consider how sensible all this madness looks, now that it’s all laid out there. Honnold, who was training to be an engineer before dropping out of university, chose the least unreal and controllable venue for the insanity of the world’s biggest free solo attempt. He prepared for it ruthlessly, devoted his whole life to it, and tracked the entire route until some of the holds felt like “old friends.” Honnold did that for the better part of eight years, then waxed it like it was a practice lap at the peak physical performance age of 31, and with a mental edge so pronounced it became the focus of official scientific inquiry.

Think about that on the day before the climb, Honnold bouldered just to stay loose, and that on the day of, after he finished, he was planning to work out because he’d only had “four hours of light exercise,” but definitely needed lunch first. The most shocking thing about Honnold’s free solo of El Cap isn’t just that it rewrote what humans are capable of, but that the human who accomplished it made it seem so logical and normal in the first place.

The feat is extraordinary without the athlete; the athlete regards it as logical and normal; by extension, the athlete is simply doing what they are there to do, and anyone watching now realizes that they are in the company of a legitimate mutant, someone whose achievements are only made normal by comparison with the extranormal person producing them. I’m out of ways to say this: Alex Honnold is human, and so are you, and that the definition includes both is proof that words are shoddy signifiers for the reality they are supposed to represent, because Alex Honnold climbed Freerider without a rope and it didn’t even seem like an unsafe, unwise thing for him to do.

If all that isn’t enough: Consider that about halfway up, Honnold was planning his next climb, a sport climb at the absurd grade of 9A. That wasn’t being presumptuous: In his mind, the climb was finished the minute he left the ground. The rest — all of the nearly 3,000 feet of it — was just light exercise.

Research has shown that every time we recall a memory, it undergoes reconsolidation, meaning we are able to add new information or a different interpretation to our remembrance, even turning fearful memories into fearless ones.

Honnold keeps a detailed climbing journal, in which he revisits his climbs and makes note of what he can do better. For his most challenging solos, he also puts a lot of time into preparation: rehearsing the moves and, later, picturing each movement in perfect execution. To get ready for one 1,200-foot-high ascent at the cutting edge of free soloing, he even visualized everything that could possibly go wrong—including “losing it,” falling off, and bleeding out on the rock below—to come to terms with those possibilities before he left the ground. Honnold completed that climb, known as Moonlight Buttress, in Utah’s Zion National Park, about 13 years after he started climbing, and four years after he started soloing.

Revisiting memories to cast them in a new light, Monfils says, is almost certainly something that we do all the time without being aware of it. But doing so actively, as Honnold did, is better—“a beautiful example of reconsolidation.”

British two-time Olympic rowing champion Alex Gregory posted a shocking picture of his blistered hands following the premature finish of his team’s expedition in the Arctic.
Gregory, who won two gold medals as part the British men's coxless fours team at both London 2012 and Rio 2016, was taking part in The Polar Row Arctic expedition in which his team has set 11 world records related to distance traveled and location.

The number of records is also an achievement in itself, as it surpassed the previous highest number of records by a man-powered rowing expedition.

They were originally set to break as many as 12 world records, but had to call off their bid due to safety fears.

“After around 7 days of tough seas and with failing power supplies we made the decision as a crew to head for the island of Jan Mayen in order to recover, recuperate and fix the technical issues we were having on board with the power supplies,” wrote Gregory on his Facebook page.

“My feet were extremely wet and cold, clothing damp, I was undernourished but to be quite honest in good spirits as we all were. I was hurting, I had been scared, I was worried about safety but I was happy,” he continued.

The 33-year-old rower also explained the decision was partly due to family reasons.

“My three young children need their dad, they need him to be responsible and to make the right decisions in life. They need him to be brave, adventurous, ambitious and to set them the right example, but they also need him to not take unnecessary risks.”

The photo of his blistered hands appeared on his social media account four days after the decision was announced to finish the expedition early.

“My hands after spending so long in wet gloves,” wrote Gregory on his Twitter.

“The blisters were never bad on this Polar row, but the wet & damp seeped into the skin…”

The Polar Row was a two-stage rowing crew Arctic expedition aiming to set a number of world records to raise funds to build a school in the Himalayas.